The new WPO report released today compares a number of polls taken both within and from outside Iran and considers several important matters: the presidential election, public views of regime legitimacy and the views of the opposition. I have already touched on some of the things WPO learned from their polling done during the late summer of last year, but it seems worth revisiting them as February 11 approaches.

One thing that is consistent across all of the polls is the self-reporting by a clear majority of respondents that they voted for Ahmadinejad. The GlobeScan and WPO polls showed similar numbers for self-reporting Ahmadinejad voters: 56/55%. That is remarkably close to the last pre-election poll result for Ahmadinejad (57%). Obviously, it is significantly lower than the final, official result of 63%, and it is in the difference between the two that we may be able to see the effects of fraud. Self-reporting Mousavi supporters shrink in number over time (32% in GlobeScan, 14% in WPO), and we can see in the WPO poll the respondents who refused to answer more than double. These respondents are likely Mousavi voters who did not want to admit to supporting him. That leaves a hard core of 14% who are still willing to admit that they voted for Mousavi, and even among these half accept Ahmadinejad as the legitimate president and believe the election was free and fair.

If only half of the 14% deny Ahmadinejad’s legitimacy, the movement that is openly opposed to him probably accounts for no more than 6-7% of the Iranian public. Meanwhile, 70% of the public accepts Ahmadinejad as the legitimate president. So when skeptics of the movement have said that it is unrepresentative and small, and when they have argued that Ahmadinejad would have won outright even without cheating, this evidence seems to indicate that they were right all along.

When the official election results came out immediately after voting and on account of other irregularities in the numbers, it was reasonable to assume that there had been some fraud. The main question then was whether the fraud was significant enough to change the outcome of the election. The WPO report’s evidence suggests that Ahmadinejad’s outright victory in the first round of voting was real and that Mousavi’s support, while substantial, would not have been enough to force a run-off.

Why perpetrate electoral fraud when you are already going to win? As in Afghanistan and Russia, the incumbent who already commanded majority support decided to boost his numbers to make the victory even more lopsided. In Ahmadinejad’s case, as the WPO report mentions, his steadily falling poll numbers during the first weeks of the campaign may have been what inspired the effort to commit fraud. Even though the incumbent’s numbers recovered as the election approached, he was already prepared to commit fraud to secure victory if necessary, and carried out the plan even though it now seems that it was unnecessary.

Enthusiastic Mousavi supporters evidently believed that their candidate was going to win, and this conviction grew stronger as the election approached. The report notes that just 18% of Mousavi supporters expected Ahmadinejad to win. This was at the very time that Ahmadinejad was actually regaining support outside Tehran, but the Mousavi supporters had no reliable way of knowing this. The “Green Wave” encouraged them and apparently rattled Ahmadinejad enough to engage in electoral fraud, but Ahmadinejad’s anxiety and the Mousavi supporters’ confidence were apparently equally baseless. As it turns out, Mousavi was never going to force a run-off, much less win the election, but his supporters strongly believed that he would win. There was a moment at the start of June when a run-off might have been possible, but Ahmadinejad managed to pull away in the final weeks. When Mousavi supporters’ expectations were not met, they latched on to the very real fraud that had taken place to explain away the reality of the loss. But even after accounting for the fraud, Mousavi supporters’ expectations were at odds with reality. Not only were his supporters not representative of a majority of the country, but they seem to have had no awareness of what the majority of their countrymen believed.

Looking at the WPO poll again, we see that even among admitted Mousavi supporters (14% of respondents) there is actually limited dissatisfaction with the Iranian political system. Just 27% of Mousavi supporters said that they were somewhat or very unsatisfied with the current system. Overall, just 10% express similar dissatisfaction. 16% of the general public and 42% of Mousavi supporters are dissatisfied with the electoral system specifically. Granted, this poll was taken several months ago. It is possible that opinions have shifted and dissatisfaction may have grown, but from what we see in this report it appears that last July was the low point for the regime. Whether it is because of resignation and disillusionment or for some other reason, even among admitted Mousavi supporters Ahmadinejad has regained ground that he had lost during the first weeks of the protests.

On the matter of Iran’s nuclear program, we should remember that the attitudes of Mousavi supporters do not differ significantly from those of the general public. 37% of them want nuclear power and weapons, while 57% of them want just nuclear power. This is almost identical to the general public’s views (38/55). There is no significant constituency for abandoning the nuclear program all together. Even on the question of enrichment, majorities of the general public and Mousavi supporters oppose giving up enrichment in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Iranian policy would not have changed significantly had the outcome been different. For our part, the United States should not be defining its Iran policy around an unrepresentative political movement.

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4 Responses to Reviewing The Iranian Election

Do I really need to point out that it hardly matter whether Ahamdi would have won anyway, since he committed a major election crime in the process? In any other genuine democracy in the world, the crime of subverting the electoral process would be considered a serious crime that would land the perpetrator in jail.

One could say, for example, that Nixon would have won the 1972 election in a landslide anyway, even without the advantage of having burglarized the DNC headquarters, among other dirty tricks. That is not an argument for not making him accountable for the crimes he committed, which on a whole were far less serious than Ahmadi’s. The great scandal of Ahamdi’s election theft was not whether he changed the outcome, but that he was willing to commit outright criminal subversion of the democratic process to either ensure his victory, or pad his margin of victory. That’s the kind of thing that ought to land him in jail, not a free pass.

So your argument here is among the most cynical I have ever heard. The Iranians are not just upset at the possibility that the election might have been stolen, and that if it wasn’t, all is well, but that their leaders have such utter contempt for democracy that they think they can get away with this kind of fraud, just because they hold power and have clerical backing. It reveals the dirty, seamy underbelly of the Iranian system, that there’s no real democracy at all, and this kind of pisses a lot of people off, even people who might have voted for Ahmadi. A lot of Nixon voters came to regret their vote for Nixon, once it was revealed what a crook he was.

So this kind of poll, suspect as it already is in an Iran where dissent can get you put in jail or executed, is truly meaningless as a way of judging whether the government will fall or not. Nixon got 60% of the vote in 1972, but the criminal scandals of his administration brought down his government, and with popular acclaim leading the way. And since the election, Ahmadi and his government have compounded their original crimes with wholesale violence and murder in the name of the Republic, as if that excuses it. This only makes it worse, in the sense of further de-legitimatizing his rule in the eyes of many.

“The Iranians are not just upset at the possibility that the election might have been stolen, and that if it wasn’t, all is well, but that their leaders have such utter contempt for democracy that they think they can get away with this kind of fraud, just because they hold power and have clerical backing.”

What the WPO poll shows is that most Iranians aren’t upset at all. An overwhelming majority accepts the result, and even more believe the election was free and fair. That doesn’t make it so, but that is apparently what most Iranians think. For that matter, the poll shows that most Mousavi supporters aren’t upset about how the electoral system works! We talk about the Iranian government’s contempt for democracy, but apparently most Iranians don’t see or resent that contempt. You refer to Ahmadinejad being delegitimized in “the eyes of many.” Well, yes, but not in the eyes of most Iranians.

If we’re trying to gauge the breadth and strength of the opposition, it makes all the difference in the world if Ahmadinejad genuinely won a majority. If we’re trying to make sense of the political significance of this movement, we have to pay attention to evidence that shows how small and unrepresentative it is. If we proceed on the assumption that the Iranian government is rapidly losing legitimacy, shouldn’t there be some evidence that contradicts this WPO finding?

The WPO report goes to great lengths to assess the potential problem of self-censoring, and I am persuaded that their results provide reasonably reliable evidence.

Revolutions are not brought about by majorities, but by motivated minorities who are able to channel whatever discontent exists into bringing down a regime. I can think of no revolution in history that was brought about by a majority. If you took a poll of Americans in 1776, you would find that most people were okay with British rule, and that those favoring revolution were in the minority. It didn’t stop the revolution from happening. Every single revolution before and since then has been brought about by a motivated minority that is upset with violations by the government. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide after Watergate, and he was supported by a majority of Americans up until the last week of his presidency.

You are not grasping the significance of the increasingly bold Iranian opposition. Relying on polls like this to judge whether the Iranian regime is going to fall or not is liking judging Louis XVI’s prospects for remaining in power by a poll in the spring of 1789 showing that most Frenchman loyally supported him. And they did, you must know?